From what I understand, it is not easy to transfer. It takes being close to the top of the class which is hard to do in law school. I was thinking about this too most likely with a tier three and hoping to at least get into tier two. I am not certain that it will work. So with this in mind, I am making certain to look at schools that I would be happy with staying at the school.

SamE397

You need to be near the top of your class but beyond that it just depends on the school policy. As far as the strategy you mentioned goes I'm just going to be honest I don't know why you would want to do that. If you're in the top 15% of your class at a good-fourth/third tier school unless you're in North Dakota or Wyoming you're going to have more opportunities than being ranked in the middle of your class or even in the top third of your class at a school ranked 50-100 and you'll be behind in the job hunt. My thoughts are this basically if you transfer, transfer up don't try to transfer unless you have a reasonable shot at getting into a top 30 school.

I'm not entirely sure how hard overall it is to transfer but I know generally a higher percentage of transfer applicants are accepted. Also I know, two people who transfered to UofM from fourth tier schools in Michigan without too much difficulty. I have heard of horror stories about schools trying to block transfers but quite frankly the guy who I heard them from seemed like a prick and I think his profs didn't want to help him out.

Finally, when I received my rejection letter from UofI it said they reserve 30 to 40 seats for transfer applicants without looking up the data I don't think they had anywhere near that many transfers so take that for whatever it's worth.

SamE397

LSAC says UofI takes about 30 transfers, so they weren't totally BSing you, even if they were erring on the high side with their "30-40" figure.

Obviously the ease of transferring in general is determined what school you're at, what grades you've got, and where you wanna end up post-transfer.

I wasn't saying they were bsing me what I was saying was that it seems like they really want transfer students but just can't fill in all the seats which is a really good thing for students looking to transfer. If you say 33-36 is a reasonable number to expect them to take that means they could only get 78-68% of the seats they wanted to fill; filled. Granted you are right they probably are overshooting but still it's a good sign for transfers.

Schools know that the GPA/LSAT evaluation is far far from perfect. Being able to prove yourself in Law school often goes a longer way in their eyes than the index number.

Yeah you have to be in the top 20% of your class to transfer to a higher tier. That being said its not like its some sort of wet dream to accomplish that, a class HAS to have a top 20%, so why not you? Also the lower end schools will have a greater proportion of students that cant handle Law school and a larger attrition rate, which obviously isn't going to hurt your chances.